Hey all, I have been straining my head to recall what was NEZ's RAC? In my recollection he would have been the only user that would have had a RAC over 600k per day until the GPU became such a big deal.

I sure remember being blown away by his impressive totals for some time - but the expense was too large in my opinion as to the black eye it gave s@H. Not to dismiss the impact that it had on himself and family.

I guess with 5000 PC's configured to run the client 24/7 you could achieve 1m RAC per day. That is only 200 credits per day per machine. Looking at my stats of nearly 650k on 17 machines the average is much higher at 38k per box.

Once they get AVX instructions working, your new core i7/i5 systems are going to propel you over a million, I'll bet. When I saw the benchmarks of what AVX can do, I was stunned, to say the least. Faster than a GPU and a 980x combined.

Honestly, I didn't think (at the time) that we'd EVER see anyone pass Nez. It was just so far beyond anything else that anyone was doing. Even as far as technology has come, it's STILL going to take someone a tremendous amount of time to catch him. His accomplishment was/is absolutely monumental, all legalities aside.

I am still in awe of the RAC that some of you have. I look at my systems and they're so puny in comparison (new i7 arrives this next week, btw). I mean a machine with 4 GTX 295s dwarfs my entire contribution to the project. It's quite astounding just how fast GPUs are these days for this kind of computation. If you'd asked me 5 years ago if I thought GPUs would make a significant contribution to any of these projects, I'd have probably laughed a bit before asking if you were insane.

When you think about it, what used to take many thousands of computers can now be done with just a few. Hell, your cell phone has more processing power than all of NASA when they put the first man on the moon. It's baffling to think in those terms.

I am certain that one day, 1 million RAC will be commonplace, probably through the usage of APUs or multiple APUs. Of course by then, Todd will be at 1 billion RAC. ;)

I, for one, am extremely anxious to see where we go from here. It's gonna be a ton of fun!-baron_iv
Proud member of:
GPU Users Group

...
I am certain that one day, 1 million RAC will be commonplace, probably through the usage of APUs or multiple APUs. Of course by then, Todd will be at 1 billion RAC. ;)

I, for one, am extremely anxious to see where we go from here. It's gonna be a ton of fun!

Perhaps, but maybe not unless funding can be found to expand the project.

Each hour of multibeam recording turns into roughly 35000 credits eventually. IIRC, Matt noted in one of his posts that they're getting something like 5 or 6 hours of recording a day on average, so the break-even point is when participants can do 175 to 210 million credits per day. Stats show over 100 miilion now...

In his 2009 email requesting donations, Dan Wertheimer mentioned recording a wider bandwidth as one of the goals they wanted to implement in 2010. Had that spurred enough donations to actually do so, things would be different.

Perhaps the best idea is for the project to put a couple of racks at Arecibo with multiple GPUs to do the crunching. Then all the mess of shipping raw data back and parcelling it out to participants could cease. That's not quite practical yet, but think ahead a year or two...

Perhaps the best idea is for the project to put a couple of racks at Arecibo with multiple GPUs to do the crunching. Then all the mess of shipping raw data back and parcelling it out to participants could cease. That's not quite practical yet, but think ahead a year or two...

Joe

And this would put an end for the need for distributed computing......
SETI@home classic workunits 4,019
SETI@home classic CPU time 34,348 hours

Yeah, it would be rather silly on seti's part to just turn away all of the folks who WANT to donate computer time to them. I am guessing it would cost the seti project several million dollars to replace all the computing power they're now receiving for "free", basically. I mean I've got several thousand dollars worth of computers sitting here feeding seti 24/7 and there are many thousands of others who have the same thing, or MORE. That's a massive asset to them, or at least I'd hope they see it like that.

If seti went down for good, I'm sure I'd find another distributed computer application to run, but it wouldn't be the same. What makes seti special is the community that's built up around it. Other distributed computing projects have great communities too, but seti will ALWAYS hold a special place in my heart because it was the first one I ran and took seriously.

When seti is down, I often switch over to milkyway, primegrid, collatz or rosetta, but I also always watch the server status like a hawk and when seti comes back up, those other projects are put on the back burner. Seti is my home, I guess that's the easiest way to put it. I hope this home stands for many many many years because I love it here.-baron_iv
Proud member of:
GPU Users Group

Yeah, it would be rather silly on seti's part to just turn away all of the folks who WANT to donate computer time to them. I am guessing it would cost the seti project several million dollars to replace all the computing power they're now receiving for "free", basically.

Not only donating comp time for free but actually donating dollars and parts to keep us going! There's not many other "jobs" that have the workers do the work for free and actually donate to keep the "job" going.

Yeah, it would be rather silly on seti's part to just turn away all of the folks who WANT to donate computer time to them. I am guessing it would cost the seti project several million dollars to replace all the computing power they're now receiving for "free", basically.

Not only donating comp time for free but actually donating dollars and parts to keep us going! There's not many other "jobs" that have the workers do the work for free and actually donate to keep the "job" going.

Once they get AVX instructions working, your new core i7/i5 systems are going to propel you over a million, I'll bet. When I saw the benchmarks of what AVX can do, I was stunned, to say the least. Faster than a GPU and a 980x combined.

I hadn't heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions before, thanks for the heads-up.

Not only donating comp time for free but actually donating dollars and parts to keep us going! There's not many other "jobs" that have the workers do the work for free and actually donate to keep the "job" going.

I have been thinking (and calculating).... I have a computer running at home and my girlfriend complains at a regular bases (a few times a year, so I can manage ;) ) about the computer being on 24/7 with the main argument the electric bill..

I started calculating and rounded things up.. In the Netherlands electricity is rather expensive and when I calculate with 150W 24/7 it sums up to 1.3MW a year. There is a site where I can calculate the costs (link, for those Dutch people interested). Fumbling around a bit with the numbers I calculate that the electric bill is about € 250,- higher because we have a computer! Taking into account that we do use the computer for "non SETI activities" and the exchange rates I have decided to (dramatically) reduce the usage of our home computer and donate the difference to SETI@HOME (this is a promise for early next year, that I will donate aprox $150 to $200)The SETI@Home Gauntlet 2012 april 16 - 30| info / chat | STATS

Once they get AVX instructions working, your new core i7/i5 systems are going to propel you over a million, I'll bet. When I saw the benchmarks of what AVX can do, I was stunned, to say the least. Faster than a GPU and a 980x combined.

I hadn't heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions before, thanks for the heads-up.

Has anyone built set@home with an AVX aware compiler yet?

ps: some specs: http://www.sisoftware.net/?d=qa&f=cpu_intel_sb

Todd offered to help the developers with AVX, hopefully someone will take advantage of his offer and we can get the ball rolling with it. The one issue is that you must be running Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (which is still in beta, but you can get it from the MSDN site) to make your computer take advantage of it. Linux distros may have it already built into the kernel, I haven't been checking lately, but expect it before windows... Mac, expect it when you get sandy bridge on the mac... ie. 2014. ;)

All joking aside, I think it will do wonders for early adopters, I am quite anxious to see how much of a difference it makes and if we see wholesale changes to the new intel architecture from many of the top crunchers because of it. My core i7 2600K will be here this week and I will help any devs in any way I can. I'd be happy to alpha/beta-test new applications they come up with or send them any information they need. In fact, it might not hurt to start up a new thread about AVX to get them thinking about it. Most of the discussion about it has been buried in other threads.-baron_iv
Proud member of:
GPU Users Group